Jungmann’s Slovesnost as Genre Theory This study considers Jungmann’s Slovesnost (‘Belles-lettres’; 1820) as a comprehensive theory of literary genres, examining the work on its own merits but also as part of the contemporary discussion on genre theory. Attention is also given to the development of this discussion in the 18th century, particularly in the German-language context at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Jungmann’s work on genre is presented as an independent contribution to contemporary thinking in the field, covering a number of aspects of genre theory: linguistic, hierarchical, historical, intermedial, and modal.
This study deals with the form and function of narrative commentary in Czech prose works of the period 1830–1880, with a focus on V. B. Třebízský’s novel Wandering Souls, in which the commentary material is particularly rich and diverse. What this analysis makes possible, first, is a number of interpretative insights into Třebízský’s work and a mapping of some of his most common narrative figures. Second, it allows us to generalize the form and function of narrative commentary in the broader literary period under consideration, for which Wandering Souls provides a workable synecdoche.
The article examines the possibility and the merits of a dialogue between genology and the theory of fictional worlds. It focuses particularly on the areas where Czech or Czech-related theory of fictional worlds (Zuska, Doležel, Traillová) offers a typology of fictional worlds, and it evaluates the potential application of such typology in genology. The types of fictional worlds, or the groups of texts defined by these types, cannot be seen quite as genological units (taxons), but they can play an important role for genology as the s.c. modus.
This study deals with a chapter in the history of Czech genre theory, namely the second (corrected) edition of Josef Jungmann’s Slovesnost (‘Belles-lettres’; 1845) and its descriptions of genre systems, in particular his system of six poetic types. It also deals with the relationship of this system to the temporal context, i.e. the past (summarizing the thinking on genre at the time that Jungmann wrote Slovesnost) and future (indicating those aspects in which Jungmann’s system remains theoretically relevant today).
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